


got this feeling that I can't go back

by rustykitchenscissors



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angel Wings, Body Horror, F/F, F/M, Fallen Angel Kirk, Forever 21, Gardens & Gardening, Heaven, Med Student Bones, Mild Gore, Rule 63, always a girl bones, always a girl kirk - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 15:15:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3072623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rustykitchenscissors/pseuds/rustykitchenscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a garden, she comes to with blood in her mouth, and above her, the porous sky. Blood: new, hot, reminiscent of the ozone layer but lacking its permeability. Cricket noise jumps at her, and drizzling rain. She croaks out, “Where am I?” and God tells her nothing in return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	got this feeling that I can't go back

Humans have dreams where they’re falling. They step off the edge of the Grand Canyon, or they walk through the automatic doors of the grocery store and there’s no grocery store on the other side, or all they do is brush the plane of a loved one’s face with chilly fingers, wondering at their beauty, and suddenly they’re turtles on their backs, and the world is one big throat, and they’re falling, falling, falling, and with a little hush of breath and clench of limb, they awake in their beds, and all is well.

When she falls, it isn’t a dream. It begins with a howling, primal and Antarctic, and the molecules of where her sternum could be rearrange in a leaping ballet. Eyes blink shut one by one by one, and wings fold inward and harden into shouldery knobs. It can’t be a dream, because she has never had a dream. But she’s never felt gravity’s cold clutch either, and now here she is, zooming inextricably downward, and flailing.

Of course, that’s not how it really begins. Probably, the beginning is the first time she asks why she can’t have legs to run with. She is only a couple hundred years old, and God tells her, “Because you have wings with which to fly.” The second beginning is the first time she asks why her voice is too quiet to scream in fear. God tells her, “Because you have hundreds of eyes with which to watch, and learn.” The third beginning is when she watches, and she learns, dipping over the edge of the nebulous blue to study each and every death, and each and every tiny rebirth, and makes experimental fists from the great vapors of her being. She was never happy with an absence of solidity, with no scraped knuckles, no fragile heart rattling its cage of bone.

So she falls. It was inevitable.  

In a garden, she comes to with blood in her mouth, and above her, the porous sky. Blood: new, hot, reminiscent of the ozone layer but lacking its permeability. Cricket noise jumps at her, and drizzling rain. She croaks out, “Where am I?” and God tells her nothing in return.

Finding legs at the end of herself, she kneels up. Soft sod indents with her weight, which is some real numerical amount. Sharp-smelling green things are strewn around her body, which is in a miniature valley, which is a structure she has always loved for how it seems vulnerable in how low it sits when actually, it wears a coat of mountainous armor. She pulls herself out and onto flat land. No one’s around. No God and no angels. No people tiny in their flesh. Just a house with a porch and a porch light swarming with moths, and she has always been drawn to burning things as well, and she walks on her knees to the porch, and there she collapses with outstretched arms and hands curled into fists and teeth all sticky-red.

 

Seven o’clock is a late start for Lenore McCoy. She prefers to be up at five, eating her bran by five-thirty, and by seven, already jogging in a carefully constructed circle around her family’s land. But last night Josh took her “out to paint the town,” and too many mint mojitos made her heavy-headed as a dandelion in full bloom. Josh went home, the way a gentleman should, and left her wrapped in her bathrobe over top her evening blouse and trousers, now ruined with rivers of wrinkles.

She awakes by stretching, muttering the muscles’ trotting names as she lengthens each one. No one closed the curtains last night, and the blasted sun drips all over everything. Lenore longs for a mop.

In the kitchen, she brews coffee in a burnt-bottomed pot, blacker than a horse’s eye before she fills it up with sweet, fresh cream. She has no time to shower, no time to look back and re-color code her notes before class, but coffee is always the top priority.

Coffee and the newspaper, to check the weather report and nothing else, because the news makes Lenore nervous. Seedy local politics and missile strikes. She knows it’s important to be up to date on current affairs so she can make proper conversation at a party, but she finds most people’s ideas of proper conversation distasteful at best. A good discussion of the history of the Black Plague is more her idea of a night of fun.

When she goes to get the paper, the door won’t open. It budges a little, then meets resistance. She pushes aside the window’s lace curtain, and sees the obstruction: a petite woman, one-hundred percent in the nude, bloody about the face and knocked out ice-rink-cold. Rapping on the window does nothing to wake her. Lenore takes the back door out.

Close up, the woman is all angles. A face like a ferret’s, golden hair spiked in disarray. Sharp hips and flat chest, indecently on display. In her arms, Lenore carries a tartan throw and the first aid kit from under her kitchen sink. She tucks the throw around the woman’s body and goes to work swiping with a cotton ball soaked in iodine at the blood dried to her chin. Beneath, no cuts or abrasions. Just smooth skin. She snaps on a rubber glove and pries open the woman’s jaw. Blood lingers in the mouth, but nothing mars her tongue or gums. It must have been coughed up in whatever accident the woman suffered to land herself here.

The same accident that destroyed Lenore’s medicinal herb garden. She’s been trying not to think about it, the person-shaped crater blotting out where her chamomile, echinacea, lemon balm, peppermint, parsley, and thyme once made their peaceful home. The whole thing’s been smashed to smithereens. Hammered to Hades. Shot to shambles. Ruined.

The woman stirs in her sleep with Lenore’s finger still between her teeth. Extracting it quickly, nervous, suddenly, with the thought of rabid lupine women tearing up garden beds in the night, Lenore whispers, “Are you awake in there?” Getting no response, she flicks the woman’s pointy chin. Waits a moment, flicks again. Not the most medically precise method, but neither Josh nor her professors are here to correct her bedside manner. Finally, a groan of impending consciousness stirs from the open mouth.

Lenore waits, crouched with her bathrobe drawn up so it won’t drag in the dew. The woman’s eyes blink open and they’re wild as Virginia pennywort and the color of the Mississippi River Blues, searching Lenore’s face like police flashlights in the forest after gloaming. There’s a long inhalation, during which Lenore asks with unwanted humor in your voice, “You have a few too many last night?” and then an undulating shriek to wake the dead.

She clamps a hand over the woman’s mouth, forgetting her fear of sudden bites. “Joseph and Mary, stop your damn hollering!” But the scream continues until the woman’s breath is reduced to a thin hiss that warms Lenore’s hand through the rubber. Pulling her hand back, Lenore gives her a warning look. “If you scream again, I swear to God.”

This is met with a series of jaw exercises as the woman gets her breath back. She gnaws and gums and occasionally _eek_ s. She breathes in and she breathes out. She says, “You,” and it’s the highest-pitched voice Lenore has ever heard. A baby mouse full of helium has got more gravitas. A cough. “You,” less high but still higher than city skylines, “you don’t know God.”

Lenore is miffed. “Just because it’s been a few Sundays since I’ve been to service doesn’t mean I need some stranger in the buff questioning my Christianity.”

The woman coughs without covering her mouth and Lenore’s face is suddenly wet. She reaches up to brush away saliva with undisguised disgust, but what comes away from her lips is dark and rusty. Blood. She springs up, and the woman’s wild eyes track her, lazy and unblinking at the same time. “Look, I bring you a blanket; I don’t call the sheriff on you for trespassing on McCoy property, and you—and you—you ruin my garden! You try to spread your disease around! I don’t have my herbs; I don’t have my hygiene; I don’t have my morning running as I please it to; all I’ve got left are my goddamn bones. Now who the hell are you?”

By way of response, the woman coughs again, splattering blood onto the throw. She sits up without regard for her modesty, letting the stained cloth slip down past her chest, and quick-fire, she grins, looking like she’s been feasting on pomegranate seeds. She says, “I’m a _goddamn_ angel.”

 

Seeing through two eyes brings focus. A swooping wing of umber hair, and how it curls stubbornly inward at the tips. The crooked bridge of a bubbly nose. A slick human hand white as fog, damp where she breathed into it as it covered her mouth, which still, still tastes like the ozone. The hand of Bones, a leftover, desolate. But stronger than skeletons have always seemed.

Inside the house, Bones shuffles around. Her walk suggests that she resents the human ability to defy gravity for even brief glimpses of flexed thigh, an instep curved. In her hand, an urn of dark liquid. She pours it in a chalice and hands it over. The blanket she offered earlier now pools on the floor, and Bones does what she can to avoid looking at this body. This body, leg and fist and lung.

“What do I call you?” Brusque. “Is there a feminization of Lucifer handy for situations where fallen angels appear as little blonde women?”

 The comparison isn’t worth acknowledging. Lucifer fell and fell and fell and fell. She fell and landed, and was reborn. She tries to say her name and only a strangled moan escapes this throat.

“You have a hairball, or what?” Bones asks, gaze still turned to the ceiling.

She tries again, and hacks, and groans. Her name is beautiful, piercing, forces the eyes shut and turns water to mist. Her name is unpronounceable with this human mouth. “I don’t think I can say my name.”

“Right. Angel of the Lord, secret agent, and what else are you? Tightrope walker in a three ring circus?”

“But I want to have a name,” she says, and sips from the chalice hot against her thin skin. The taste is more metallic than the blood in her mouth. And loamy, she imagines, and deep. Dry pain emanates from the back of her throat. “Hurts.”

Bones frowns. “You might have torn the lining of your throat. You should let me take you to the hospital to be sure. That and to check out what kind of whammy it took to make you a delusional amnesiac naked in my kitchen.”

She’s seen hospitals, and they were blinding and sterile as heaven, and she’s seen doctors, and doctors love leeches. She shakes her head. “I need to sleep.” Her voice is still raw from the liquid, which she might think were poison were Bones not gulping it greedily down. 

With a heavy exhalation, Bones reaches out a hand. “Coffee’s a mite counterintuitive then, Angel.”

“That’s not my name,” she says as she hands the drink over.

“Well, you need some kind of a name. And some kind of clothing. And some kind of place to lay your head down, so.” Bones beckons her out of the room, down a strip of hallway painted the grey of rain. It’s full of faces, flat and shiny, grouped together, grinning. She practices smiling with this mouth. She feels it in her teeth.

The room Bones leads her into is darker than the rest of the house, but Bones flicks the wall and then there is light. A pared down room, a bed and a chest of drawers, sheets neat the way the garden must have been before she came crashing down.

“Here.” Bones thrusts a gown at her, still, still averting her eyes. “I’ll be gone for the day, but you get some shut-eye, and then we’ll sort out where the hell you wandered in from and how to get you back.”

Softly swaddled in the gown, she doesn’t want to go back. As Bones removes the light and then herself from the room, she knows she’ll never have to.  

 

Josh joins Lenore on the lawn for lunch. He’s in his best argyle sweater vest, hair combed all neat, and she can physically feel the bags under her eyes and the incongruity of her mismatched socks. She sets the Tupperware container with his sandwich in front of him and opens her own Waldorf salad. “Someone had a wild night, huh?” he asks, and she makes him wait to be scoffed at until she’s done chewing and swallowing.

“I don’t know what happened, but that was some other girl.”

“Yeah, some other girl ready to rip a man’s throat out over the proper way to play gin rummy.” Her face gets warm. She stuffs a chunk of apple in her mouth. “How about I come over tonight and you tell me more about that other girl.”

She swallows it down still a solid. “I have to study cardiovascular diseases, Josh.”

“I’ll watch you study.”

“Studying isn’t a spectator sport. You get out on the field or you go home to your mother.”

Josh looks sullen, his mouth weak and wobbly and his eyes stabbing holes into her. He opens his mouth and Lenore sighs, long-suffering as a bull shark.  “To be entirely honest with you,” she says, “I took in a stray cat. And I know you’re allergic. But the poor thing was mewling and rolling around and looking half-starved and I couldn’t say no. I just need to get her a name and a home and everything’ll be right as reindeer between us again, I promise. Babe.”

He leans in for a kiss. He gets used to rejection.

 

When she comes to, it’s from a weight hitting her chest. A book, and the front says—

“Baby names. You wanted one.”

“A baby?” A kicking thing.

“A name.”

For dinner, Bones makes salmon—and how would a ripping river of water feel on this newborn skin—and something called couscous that she says to eat with a fork, with delicacy, instead of the hands spooning it up like panning for gold. One hand fumbles with the fork while the other flips through the baby name book, and on her food-laden tongue she sets names like “Bethany” and “Carol” and “Delilah,” names that sing and itch in her throat where she can feel her ancient soul pantomiming years of godly meaning. She closes her eyes and whispers the names of women she has watched over through holes in the fabric of the universe, learning their inner lives in telescopic glimpses.  “Mariam. Zoe. Ethel. Amara. Noor. Sun.”

And Bones says, “You’re spitting all over the good tablecloth. Use the damn book; it cost me ten-fifty.”

So she flips through it more, through, “Elisabeth, Farrah, Gloria, Henrietta, Ida, Janice—“

“It’s pronounced Jan-iss,” Bones interrupts, and she too spits on the good tablecloth, and dabs at the spot with her napkin. “Not like the ice you put in your drink.”

“Like the god with two faces,” she muses, tracing her finger around the name.

“Didn’t know angels could worship false idols.”

Swallow first, and it is still painful, but she remembers longing for pain like this, like a ragged truth of embodiment, a promise of the temporary. “I know mythology. God of passages. God of transition.”  
  
“That’s spelled a different way, you know.”  

“Spellings are arbitrary. An attempt to bring order to all-consuming vibrational power of sound. I am Janice now.”

“Janice,” Bones repeats, and Janice says, “Janice,” right back to her, and she fills her mouth with golden couscous, and it shows through her teeth when she grins.

 

Sleep comes slower than the waxing of the moon. Blankets Rapunzel-tangle around Lenore’s restless limbs as Janice snores on the living room couch. A sonorous sound for a slip of a thing. Lenore still worries about the damage to her throat, on top of the deep well of exhaustion clearly in her bones, and her continued refusal, obstinate or unavoidable, to give any hints as to where she came from. After dinner, over a nightcap, Lenore pressed gently, like testing the tenderness of a bruise, with floating question marks pointing to abusive boyfriends and gang activity and recreational drug use gone too far, and Janice just said, “You know, I don’t think you’d like Heaven,” and squinted into her mug of milk and amaretto while brushing her hand against the tip of her tongue as though mapping out the taste buds.

 

Now, Lenore does the same to an image of the heart, full-color and intricate in the textbook splayed before her. With only slippery starlight to illuminate the room, the heart appears as a haunted house, both cavernous and cramped and dark as Janice’s blood, which, earlier, graced Lenore’s face like a kiss: unwanted, poisonous, wet. Somewhere between three and four she falls asleep with her cheek against the textbook’s glossy page, whispering, “Dysrhythmia,” and all around her, Janice’s snores a thunderstorm.

 

Salmon don’t shower, but this body does, and the act is similar to submission to the river, in that the water lifts you up and pulls you on. Hot as the handle would let it go, it grabs the dirt and blood of earth and being human from her skin, drags her hair down with soothing hands, and her eyelashes glitter with the stuff, fogging her two-eyed vision, prickling at the membranous skin there.

On the edge of the tub is a green bottle that smells like the ruined garden. She pours it out into her hand, viscous, cool, almost the texture of space-time. All over her body, all over her head, massaged into her face and her calves and odd small-cloud swells of these breasts. She took Bones’ garden from her, but she will be the garden now. A fresh, new thing, born from the soil. Rinsed in the kitchen sink. An hallelujah and full of spring-time, which, she is learning, makes this body sneeze and flood with pale mucus and saliva in long strings. She spits and watches it swirl down the drain with the hot water, with the dirt, with the blood, with the sweat, and that is new too. There is so much fluid to being a solid.

Done and out and clean, she wipes the condensation from the mirror to find slices of face, hard shoulder, hip, and leans up closer into them, presses her mouth to the surface, which is less like water, just a boundary. And oh, to have a mouth that can scream and bleed. This morning, she watched Bones paint her own mouth a more solemn pink, with a little wand and delicate strokes.

“Are you hiding?” she asked, and Bones answered, “My skin is my own business,” rubbing liquid flesh into her boundary flesh until she looked more all one piece. Not porous the way people are, and in the mirror, Janice inspects the watery whites of her eyes, the mucus-filled yawns of her nostrils, the gaps between her teeth and the space beneath her tongue.

“Ahhh,” she says, and her breath fogs the mirror back up.

With Bones at school, she’s free to wander the house without clothes, catching glimpses of this body in every reflective surface, noticing how the little volcanos of her skin bubble up where the air is cold. There are windows, and Bones said something about that, about not “causing a ruckus for the neighbors,” but she’s been out there and there’s no one around for long unspooled skeins of space. This is McCoy land, which she knows has something to do with wealth and power and solitude. Naming always does.

But laid out on the kitchen table is a shirt, a pair of pants, a trowel, and a note. _Put these on and fill up the moon crater you left in my yard. We’ll work on replanting later. –Lenore McCoy._

Swallowed by the shirt and pants falling down her hips, she kneels, moving fresh dirt into empty space, already undoing the shower’s work as flecks of soil stick to her forearms, her lips—she edges her tongue out and licks them up to confirm that the drink Bones gave her very much was loamy. But cleansing is a ritual process, something people repeat again and again as a way of worshipping futility; Bones had said something about not worshipping false idols, but God is comprised of many idols, a beehive of figures and concepts and needs. Transitions, passages, pain, futility, flesh.

She fills the hole and she fills the hole. She says a prayer for every uprooted herb buried in the onslaught of earth.

 

If Lenore had really taken in a stray kitten, she would be putting up posters all over the Post Office, and the supermarket, and the bulletin boards on campus. FOUND: SMALL, TAWNY CAT, EASILY CONFUSED, EATS LIKE A MONSTER WHO’S NEVER READ MISS MANNERS, ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF THE TWO-FACED GOD.

Or she’d be driving her to the nearest vet, seeing if she can drop her off. She likes to think she couldn’t be getting cozy with the cat, buying her a scratching post, setting down firm cat person roots.

She’d like to think she’s gonna call the police department soon and ask if they’ve got any missing persons who match Janice’s description. She’d like to think, even as she does so with full awareness and a functioning mind, that she isn’t returning to her house with her eyes tired from squinting into microscopes all day, and, instead of settling down with a true crime novel and some hot tea, shaking Janice awake from her dirt-covered nap on the pristine ecru couch to say, “How about we buy you some clothes that don’t make you look like you’re starving to death?”

Lenore has a lot of dreams, and she likes to keep them carefully notated in decoupaged dream journals, and they never, ever come true.

On the drive to the mall, she puts _Twisted Angel_ in the sound system, and pulls over to the side of the road to undo and readjust Janice’s seatbelt, which is Twizzler-twisted and somehow caught on the top of one ear. “You ride in the trunk on the way to my property?” she asks. “You travel everywhere on your favorite pet Pegasus?” Janice squirms as she tries to lay the seatbelt flat across her torso, and doesn’t answer, but does smile with one side of her mouth, making her look very much like a cat who’s just caught the mouse that’s been plaguing her owner’s pantry.

Pink blossoms floating across the windshield and Leann Rimes _na na na_ ing, Lenore straightens up and pulls back onto the road, and just barely avoids being clipped by a red Toyota, and swears under her breath. Janice, still in the too-big jeans Lenore left out for her, kicks her feet up onto the dashboard, and moves the old sneakers that blessedly fit her in time with the windshield wipers.

“Down,” Lenore says. Janice looks down, then back up.

“What?”

“Never mind. Stop fidgeting; I can see you in my peripheral vision.”

“I used to have several kinds of extraperipheral vision.” Janice hums with the song. “Now most of my field of vision is occupied by your face. It’s very beautiful.”

If it weren’t for her quick-as-a-rattlesnake reflexes, Lenore would’ve just crashed the car.

 

When they get out of the car with its glorious powerful humming engine and humming music and humming in-out of Bones’ heavy breath, its vibrations like universe strings, stroked like a harp and sending cities tumbling into ruin, Bones says, “This is a parking lot. It’s made of asphalt. That’s a mall. It’s made of glass. That’s the sky. It’s made of an assortment of several chemicals. I’m buying you clothes in the mall. They’ll be made of polyester because you don’t seem to have a red cent on you and natural fibers cost money I’ve already put toward tuition.”

“Okay,” Janice says, and she loves the knife sound of her new voice.

“And you’re not my responsibility.” Then she takes Janice by the firmness of her bicep and walks her into the mall, which is made of glass.

The mall is also made of many rooms, and herds of people clutching bags, and the smells of salt and sweat. The first room they pass says, “Forever21,” above its doorway, and Janice drags Bones toward it.

“It’s a joke,” she says, “right? Because people age and die!”

Bones grumbles, “Mortality is a serious endeavor and these clothes are trashy.” She pauses, her painted lips pressed hard together. “But they are cheap, I guess,” and she lets Janice continue dragging her.

Inside is all a thrum of music bright as brass and clanging too, and young girls painted bolder colors than Bones, with their hair long and glossy, and their voices sapling rubber trees. This place wasn’t built for people with their two eyes, with their non-ethereal bodies and their need to breathe in big gulps, like she’s been practicing, alone in Bones’ home, tracing the movement of oxygen through her throat and chest and stomach, how it opens up in the bloodstream.

“Are all of these clothes for me?” she yells at Bones over the music.

“It’s not that loud,” Bones hisses back. “And you pick things out. You try them on. You like this, Angel?” She holds up a flowing white gown and Janice bats it away. She isn’t a cloud thing, a human construction of purity and virginity and all else that is holy amen. She can chew and she can swallow and she can spit it all back up and if she peeled back the fat of her thigh she’d find clockwork muscle churning underneath.

She picks up a pair of pants patterned like a wild beast and hands them off to Bones, who says that she’s not a fucking armoire, but takes them anyway. And a black jacket that feels like plastic skin between the pads of her fingers, and a pile of shirts that cover only her breasts, and black skirts that make her legs shadow creatures, vultures with wingspans recalling the infinity of railroads. In a dressing room, she tries on something Bones called jeggings, and does lunges in them, grunting, watching the flexible realness of her body in the mirrors on all sides.

“I love it here, Bones!” she yells at the mirrors. Three different Janices yell into each other’s open mouths. And when she exits the little room, Bones thrusts a soft bundle of clothes into her arms, pink and patterned with the concept of hearts, which is another concept God is made of, which she tells Bones happily, twirling the bits of fabric through the air.

“You need pajamas,” Bones says. “For tonight. Don’t think you’re sleeping in my house on an ongoing basis.” Janice hits the pajama shirt against the side of Bones’ head and electricity ties it to her hair, her sculpted hair the color of new soil and Janice screams an undulating joy sound and Bones claps her hand over this mouth. Janice sneezes into her palm.

It all costs a number that makes Bones says, “Just because you don’t know who you are doesn’t mean you can’t get a job.”

 

One night, Josh comes over and all Hell breaks loose. It’s been four days since Lenore found Janice naked on her front steps and there’s been no progress in replanting her memories, but the herb garden is coming along all right, and now Janice mostly chews with her mouth closed and loves her new clothes more than wearing none. “I’ll find the kitten a home soon, I swear,” Lenore’s been telling Josh when they pass in the hallways, when they eat lunch on the lawn, when he calls her up as she’s falling asleep and she cups the phone close to her like that’s what she’s in love with, this symbol of him, instead of the real live man with the real live 4.2 GPA and polite hands.

“Not just anyone can be trusted with a life, Josh. It’s a lot of responsibility.” And he’s been huffing, and sighing, and raking his fingers through his hair so it comes undone.

They’re just finishing up the cheeseburgers Janice insisted Bones pick up on her way home from school. “This is real person trash,” Janice says through a mouthful of all-American beef, her elbows on the tabletop, globs of cheddar and ketchup dotting her jawline and gluing her fingers together. Her crop top has “surfboard” stamped across it in jagged all-caps and her hair is chestnut-shell-spiky with the mousse she clearly swiped from Lenore’s dressing table.

“That’s a weird thing to say, Janice,” Lenore tells her, dabbing at her chin with a gray plaid napkin, and then the doorbell rings.

A light rain has started since she last looked outside, and Josh’s bangs are flat to his forehead, his polo shirt sticking to his ribs like a good bowl of chili. She closes the door around her so he can only see the sliver of living room above her head, and tries to remember how to smile like a loving girlfriend. “Is something wrong?”

His brow furrows. “Look,” he says, “Lenore.” She cranes over his shoulder and sees his truck parked sideways in her driveway. “If you want to keep this kitten, I understand.” He reaches into his pocket, and her heart raised against her will on romance movie tropes skips a beat, but it’s a bottle of Benadryl. “I’ll take these every time I come over. It’s fine. Don’t let a dumb cat come between us.” He puts a hand on her shoulder and humps his hips toward her obscenely. She shrugs away and closes the door a little further so her left arm is all the way inside. 

“Benadryl makes you drowsy. Drowsy people don’t study adeptly. People who don’t study adeptly don’t come first in their class. People who don’t come first in their class—”

“Don’t date Lenore McCoy. Chill out. It’s a Friday. Remember last weekend?” Elephant tusk grin courtesy of Crest 3D Professional Effects Whitestrips. 

If she says she remembers it, it was really her. If she says she doesn’t remember it, she was really that drunk. “Janice doesn’t like strangers,” she says, putting a hand on his hip and pushing him back.

“Is Janice—” he begins, but it’s too late. She said the fatal words. Already there are footsteps behind her.

Already, “Bones, I love strangers. Who’s there? The mail man? Met him this morning!” And Lenore is being nudged out of the way with elbows like two scissors, Janice raising up on the balls of her feet and maneuvering her chin onto Lenore’s shoulder.

She should be focused on how this looks to Josh, but instead she turns to Janice and asks, “Do all angels of the Lord have certified weapon chins or are you the shining star of the bunch?”

It’s taken her a little to learn to laugh, but she does now, like a chihuahua’s bark. “Little of both,” she says, before locking eyes with Josh and squirreling her hand around Lenore’s side to offer it to him. “This is a customary greeting. Rituals give meaning to people’s lives.”

“Uh, yes.” He doesn’t take her hand. “I didn’t know you had a friend over.” His eyes are still on Janice, but he’s using the tone he only ever takes with Lenore. Like he’s talking to a child lost in a supermarket at six a.m. on Black Friday and he’d rather be at home playing computer golf.  

“She just dropped by unexpectedly. To, uh. Wash the dishes.” Lenore coughs.

“Is your dishwasher broken?”

“Oh, no.” Janice shoves Lenore further to the side. “It sounds the way the ocean does from very far away. Very far away.”  

“Okay. And Janice doesn’t like strangers but does like…”

Janice shakes her hand at him more urgently. “I’m Janice. That’s my name.”

“You’re not a cat.”

Lenore shrugs. “That’s debatable.” Behind her and beside her, still, the startling solidity of Janice, how she vibrates always, in time with something unseen, and Josh is working his jaw around the problem—Janice’s vibrations, Janice’s existence, Lenore’s white lie.

“You’ve been ignoring me. To hang out with gutter trash? What, are you shooting up together, or you just having pillow fights in your underthings?”

“She has amnesia,“ Lenore starts, and he shushes her with a hand held in front of his face, curled like claws will pop from his fingers at the next hint of a syllable.

“Yeah, I wish I did too.”

And he turns. And he walks back down the driveway. And Janice calls after him in her smallest voice yet, “I’m not gutter trash,” her tone absent of any suggestion of offense, just like she’s a schoolteacher correcting a child’s cursive.

On his way out, Josh rams his car into her mailbox, and it pliés to his force. Janice nestles her chin once more between Lenore’s shoulder and neck. “That guy was an asshole,” she says. “Dump him.” And she walks inside.

 

Janice has been watching movies. One morning before school, Bones showed her how to work the deeveedee player, as well as the television, and how all her deeveedees were arranged by genre and subdivided alphabetically in the wicker baskets surrounding her television stand.  It’s something approaching a miracle, the science of laser and of film, of recording, permanence, leaving an impression.

After she watched her first movie, _East of Eden_ , she slipped out the backdoor, screen banging behind her, scissors in hand from above Bones’ stove; it was misty that day, all the land a bathroom mirror, and she shivered in her short shirt, short skirt, and no shoes. Looking up at the sky as it lazed above her, she took a hank of hair between middle and pointer fingers, and she snipped it off, and held it golden in her hand, and she buried it in the earth.

Permanence, impression. A new James Dean swagger when she walked.

Bones came home and tsked about her looking like she got in a tussle with an immersion blender. An hour later, Janice’s hair was cropped close to her head. “Jean Seberg,” Bones called her, and they watched _Breathless_ on the couch together in the dark. After, Janice snuck into the bathroom and stole fistfuls of her hair from the trashcan and buried her face in them. Inhaling brought tiny hairs bristling in her nostrils, and memory of the first feel of hair brushing against her cheek when she came to. She hid it all in the yard with the first bit, burial of the body heaven told her to have.

Gardening is a process of burial for bodies that will be risen. When she tells Bones this, Bones says, “Don’t be sacrilegious.”

“Well, I already fell from Heaven.”  
  
“Did it hurt?” A smile Janice doesn’t understand twists up Bones’ face.

“Yes. A lot.”

In her first garden, Bones started from seeds. Now they transplant from herbs bought at the grocery store. Too much time, too much rebuilding. One by one, they place new herbs in the re-tilled ground, testing.

Dill feels like feathers between her fingers; Bones nudges her and says, “It’s delicate. Careful.” To kneel in the dirt with Bones is to consider the human act of prayer. Holy speech and holy embodiment. She closes her eyes and pushes her consciousness to where the skin brushing the tops of her cheekbones is turning red with sun.

Inside, Bones rubs aloe on her face and shoves a bottle of, “Sunscreen. Who raised you,” into her hands, which have soil under the fingernails and trowel callouses on the padding of the palm.

It’s funny how she thinks, _God brought me forth from the swirling cosmos and pulled me through millennia_ , but does not bother letting it leave her tongue. She’s beginning to suspect that Bones really doesn’t believe that she’s an angel, that when she says, “Concussion,” or, more lately, “Some kinda amnesia,” with a weary sigh, she isn’t just joking around. Janice could tell her things, secrets, the history of the whole universe hidden in the subdivisions of a leaf; Janice could scream for other angels to come bringing fearsome tidings and thunder and lightning. Or Janice could live her life. Just let it go.

 

The hurricane changes Lenore’s mind. It’s been three days since she’s seen Josh in more than glimpses, swooshes of khaki and the lingering scent of pomade. At lunch, she studies alone on the lawn, inside a circle of highlighters, like she’s some kind of ABC Family witch. Progressively, Janice’s sleeping quarters have shifted, so that she now, instead of the couch, occupies a nest on the floor by Lenore’s bed. Sheets and blankets and pilfered college sweatshirts with holes in the armpits and stains at the hems curled into soft concentric shapes where Janice makes up the bone-bag center.

“You aren’t a prized pit bull and I’m not entering you in any pageants,” Lenore said when she first stumbled into the nest after a night of listening to “Jolene” on repeat and closed-eyed sipping scotch on the couch.

Janice, just pretending to sleep, with her hands Precious Momentsing beneath her face, kicked out, catching Lenore in the shin, then whispered the word, “Sandwiches.” She’d recently become infatuated with sandwiches. Stacking. Filling. The concept of combination and the precise constitution of mayonnaise.

Lenore was a proper lady. Lenore only halfheartedly kicked back.

Tonight, she drives home through a Georgia aggressively wet as a dog at the local pool. Hands and jaw in tandem tense, shoulder blades shoved back like they’ll melt together into wings, and the hum of the windshield wipers doing nothing to loosen her up. It’s gonna be a rough one, gonna be an aquarium in the streets, gonna be totaled cars floating in the deep blue serene with their drivers bloated and eel-white, and between mental flashes of her own bacteria-ridden corpse, she sends a prayer of thanks up to the Lord that at least they named this storm Joaquin instead of Janice.

Lenore cannot abide poetic coincidences in her life. To be swallowed whole by the demon girl who ruined her relationship would—Janice’s mouth, wet and wild, a thing full of blood and big square teeth—   

No. Lenore cannot.

Lightning cackling at her back, she somehow makes it home. The front yard is practically quicksand, and she has to squint to see, but it looks like Janice has already begun boarding up the windows, if not, thank the Lord again, the front door.

Inside, hammering wars with the rain’s drumming thrumming blowing the house down. Weed-muscle arms suntanned and nicked all over and blue eyes, for once, narrowed. Janice licks sweat from the corner of her lips, rubs the back of her wrist across her forehead, and gives a nail a final thwack before looking at Lenore in wonder.

Inside is a bright, dry place.  “How goes the battening?” Lenore asks as she shrugs out of her jacket.

“Making it a castle.” That voice like the verge of tears, but pride somewhere in it. “And God’s making a moat to help.” She grins, and again, Lenore thinks _Lucifer_ , but.

She picks up another hammer, another board, and sets to securing the front door. No more Joshes and no more stray blondes in their slippery selkie skins.

Around nine, out goes the power, but they’ve got candles, safely floating in white bowls of water. They’ve got a flashlight the size of Janice’s head. The hurricane’s been stirring up a howling, a chorus of hungry wolves scratching at the door, and Janice has been humming with it, a blanket draped around her shoulders, which are golden as her hair, and as, “Silence,” Lenore pleads. “Let’s be alone with our thoughts for one second.”

But when she looks closely, Janice is shivering, huddling inward. Howling to make herself larger than she is. “Bones,” she says, and Lenore begins her usual protestations toward the name, but stops when Janice puts up no fight, just stares into her, dumb big eyes, dumb beautiful ferret face. Silence gleaming between them, and then. “Bones, something is wrong with this.”

“Yeah, I don’t much like playing Abe Lincoln either, Angel.”

“There wasn’t supposed to be a storm today.”

“The Weather Channel said—”

“The Weather Channel can only know so much.” Her whole face scrunches up. Yes, it’s cute. Lion cubs are cute until they grow up and devour your flesh. “Look, maybe I don’t know how to use a ‘Mr. Espresso,’” and she does, in fact, bunny-ear her hands around the words, “but I know a whole lot you’ve never dreamed about, Bones. I know the skies and the oceans. I know when the world is quiet and when it gets wild and right now it’s not meant to be wild.” She takes Lenore’s hand. “Heaven is up to something wrong.”

At first, all the business about Heaven was vaguely charming. A fairy tale. Lenore could come home from a day elbows-deep in the grisly corporeality of breathing, bleeding, being a person in the world, and indulge in a fantasy of winged things and good will toward men. Now, in the midst of the literal whirlwind, it unnerves her, and Janice’s palm is too smooth and welcoming, and Lenore draws her hand back with haste.

“We’re not playing pretend right now, Janice. We’re hunkering down and hoping the eggs don’t spoil.”

“I can hear something coming,” Janice says. “Even with these ears.”

“It’s called nature’s fury and it’s inescapable.”

“It’s called I fell and they want me back.”

Which Lenore would never believe, not ever, if a fist of wind didn’t crash right through the kitchen window, board and all, and bring with it a screaming from no throat of woman born.  

 

It’s like, well. When people move into new homes, they get their friends to help them. They buy their friends pizza. There’s good-natured ribbing. This is what sitcoms have taught her.

When people move into new bodies.

She had the power of flight and then she didn’t have the power of flight. She had no skin but of prayers and sidereal chaos and then she had skin that bruised when she walked into coffee tables. She had no coffee tables and then she had coffee tables. She had no coffee and then caffeine bee-buzzed in her bloodstream, which was red as sacrifice. In the shower, she touched this body and this body touched these hands back. In the garden, dirt trapped beneath her nails, inchworms held squirming in her palms. Staring in the mirror, holding her own hair. And the weight of Bones’ hand on her shoulder any time she taught her something new about how to move through this, the real world, the alive world of things that break and then mend.

When people move into new bodies, there is an aloneness, and there is burning in the throat, and there is only pizza two times, but there is Bones, and there is the knowing that this body is the right body, that the fists she tried to form from her heavenly only being dreamed of being these real live fists she clenches now, ragged nails into palm, as the sky screams in through the kitchen window and she hunches in on herself and screams right back.

(Bones screams also, like she’s been ripped from gravity, and almost, Janice believes that she is not alone.)

It’s a horrible noise, but she knows it. The hurricane is screaming her first name.

A whip of lightning, and there in the window, hundreds of eyes staring in, their bloodless whites, their all-consuming pupils.  Hundreds of eyes with which to see right through her in her dumpling skin and she wraps herself around Bones’ back like a cape. “You’re Batman,” she whispers into the soft shell of Bones’ ear and Bones keeps screaming in response. “You’re just Batman,” like nothing bad has happened and she isn’t about to be taken from this life, which is life entirely and is still so new and sweet on her tongue.

Rain rushes in and soaks the kitchen counter, spilling onto the floor. She’s thankful for the power outage, that water won’t bring fire, that there will be some finite end to the destruction, and at that thought, she adds to the screaming Bones beneath her a whispered, “I’m so sorry about me.”

Still, the wind howls, but the angel in the window has bid it stop screaming her name, and Bones’ voice grows threadier until she is only shuddering with shallow breath, and Janice wraps herself around her tighter, like she is the only anchor to earth.

It’s hard to watch, the eyes squirming and shrinking and shoving themselves through the window, wings and various vapors following in their wake, but when all is done, there it is in the kitchen: a shadow of Janice’s former self. A body for watching. A body for hovering on the edge of the action. No kind of a body at all.

The eyes blink. Janice blinks back. Bones’ eyes are squeezed tight as her spine is curled.

“Be a pal and patch that up,” Janice calls over the wind and rain.

A voice that is not a voice but a hum pervading the air, thrumming in tune with the high-pressure air, says, _We wondered where you’d gone._

Janice has never been happier that she didn’t fall as-is. That her speech doesn’t strum the universe strings like a harp to make itself heard. “You sound like a yappy dog,” Bones has told her over and over, and even as she grunted in annoyance at the time, a yappy dog is a trillion times preferable to an immaterial omniscient presence with no vocal cords to call its own.

_A hole formed in the sky and the hole was your name._

Janice shrugs. “Shit happens. I was there and then I was here.”

The eyes close and the howling intensifies, and she feels something wrong in the skin of her back. She imagines it’s how Earth felt when Pangea broke apart. A softness suffusing her muscles, dizzying, lightness pulling her up and she knows what this is, and she presses her hands to her shifting spine to hold it all together.

_We can fix that._

Bursting from her back, wings the brightness of the stars seen from camping out in the yard on a clear night. Wings that cocoon her and Lenore in turn. Wings that mean: soon, no legs. No tense tendons. No morning jogs.

“There’s been some kind of mistake,” Janice says, but her voice is growing faint.

_We can fix that_ , says the angel. _Not all who fall are lost._

Her parents’ horse stables, brushing Queen of the Giants’ chestnut mane. The Savannah beach with a stack of Agatha Christies and hardly any children around at all. This one poorly lit dive bar right off the freeway where Josh has never seen her getting truly out of hand. Her medicinal herb garden before Janice ruined it. Her medicinal herb garden with Janice kneeling in the soil.

College counseling folks always told her to find a safe space, somewhere in her mind where nothing else could touch her. She was never very good at it. The counselors always called her too combative.

The reality of things: She’s on her living room couch. A woman she’s been having not totally decent thoughts about has pressed her whole body around her. The woman pressed around her is not so much just a woman at all, but a woman with enormous, soft, hurts-to-look-at-them silver-white wings. A voice has crawled inside her head, and it’s the kind of voice you want to hold in your hand, like a sapphire or a human heart. The kind most people will never hold even once. Her window has shattered to pieces, and she’s gonna need a whole Bed Bath and Beyond’s worth of towels.

As long as she’s acknowledging the reality of things, she opens her eyes all the way, and cranes her neck, and looks at Janice dead-on. Against her back, she can feel Janice’s heartbeat galloping fit to win the race, but her face is still-water, skin smooth as that, eyes as damp. Around her, the wings continue expanding; they should be beautiful, but something is wrong. “Something is wrong,” is what Janice told her earlier. “Something is wrong,” is what Lenore ignored.

“Something is wrong,” Lenore says to Janice.

The voice in her head _hmm_ s, a buttermilk-rich sound, too rich for Lenore’s blood.

_You’ve been neutered, but through God, nothing is permanent. You’ve been lost, but through God, all is found._

When Janice opens her mouth, there is only a high sheen of sound, glistening in the air but absent of meaning. When Janice releases Lenore and rolls over the back of the couch, it takes all the trembling in her body to rise back to her feet. As she moves, her skin loses its smoothness, begins bubbling like a thermal spring, and Lenore wants to look away, never wants to see the creature hidden just beyond Janice’s wingspan, but then Janice is crawling her way to the bathroom, and in the kitchen is something all eyeball and no mouth, all cloudstuff and no dirt under the nails.

Screaming would be insufficient. A heart attack would be blessed. Following Janice into the bathroom is the righteous and right-headed path.

Something like a girl kneels on the blue tile, beloved clothes falling shredded from her body, skin birthing tumescent obtrusions all over. The hands are not entirely hands anymore, but something Lenore could put her own hands right through. And between Janice’s frail knees are a pair of scissors that Lenore used to cut her hair just days before.

“Please,” is the silent shape on Janice’s lips. And Lenore knows. And if she gets through this Hell on Earth, Lenore is gonna be a surgeon one day.

There’s more blood than in a haircut. There’s more screaming than there is good-natured bitching and fidgeting and trying to steal the scissors out of Lenore’s hands. And if Lenore’s skin begins to grow an unearthly golden as she cuts, she pretends to take no notice, and if, once Janice’s voice is back full-throttle, it pierces Lenore’s eardrums like her grandmother’s embroidery needles, she won’t hiss, “Indoor voice,” just this once.

Anyway, the shrieking from the kitchen is much worse than any noise Janice could ever make. Probably how the Wicked Witch sounded when Dorothy threw water on her. If that had been real, instead of just a story. Which it was. Winged monkeys. Worlds above rainbows. Nonsense. Lenore doesn’t hold with nonsense. Not at all.

A thick fall of feathers consumes the floor and their legs with it until she’s down to the shredded, bloody mass of Janice’s back and shoulders, which in some places has begun to scab over, but in other places is red and raw and in bad need of some iodine.

Through the frosted glass of the window over the toilet, she can see no more pelting rainstorm. The shrieking from the kitchen ceased long ago.

Janice lays her head down on Lenore’s shoulder. Her skin is flat to the bones again. She breathes like she’s been pulled from deep in the ocean. Lenore sets the scissors down between them. Her skin’s still lit up like a sunset. “It’s over,” she says, and almost adds, _Angel_ , but instead puts her hand at the nape of Janice’s neck, where the shorthairs stick straight out, and rests her forehead against the crest of Janice’s skull, and closes her eyes like they’re still on the couch, still hiding out from the storm.

 

Mint straight from the garden and crushed between her teeth keeps Janice’s mouth preoccupied as they run in loop-de-loops around the McCoy property, but Bones’ silence is a hundred percent internally motivated, her unpainted lips a statuesque line. Her limbs pump extra hard to keep up with Janice’s tendency to throw her body forward against the world again and again, always waiting to meet resistance but only ever finding the clean emptiness of air. Mint, a taste that stings the way the friction of her shirt did against her still-healing back, before she peeled it off and left it to wait in the grass.

Since she fell to Earth, she has loved nothing more than drinking the sunlight straight through her pores—hilarious inventions, little bodily tunnels all over—but since the hurricane, light has been so much brighter, so much warmer, and she’s felt herself so needy for it always, always lying on her back in the grass in the sunglasses Bones insisted on buying for her, which do make her feel like a CIA agent, and she is, in a way, afloat in the sea of identity, a double-named woman flush with scars.

Nothing has felt as important as brightness and warmth since Lucifer came to take her to the cold and dark below. Her curved palm against Bones’ blushing face; burrowing in the mountain of blankets and comforters on Bones’ bed; the jumpy sight of the flames on the stove as Bones cooks them dinner each night; and the sun, the sun, the sun.

Behind her, gasping, and a halting of footsteps, and she stops too, though it takes a moment. Always her momentum is bigger than herself. She turns to see Bones doubled over with her hands on her knees in their grey sweatpants, too hot for the weather. “I need. Water,” Bones grunts, and looks up at Janice. “And you do too. You’re sweating like a convenience store hot dog.”

Janice wipes her face on upper arm and laughs, holds out a helpful hand that Bones knocks away.

Not that Lucifer said, “I’m Lucifer,” or anything. Not that there’s any way to distinguish between Lucifer and any other angel. It’s just.

She has to believe God would want her to have this. Her heartbeat, hard inside her skeleton. What six shots of Jack does to her in a dark bar on a Friday night. Looking beneath the hood of a car and seeing a map of the universe. The faintly mineral taste of Bones’ skin on her tongue.

God gave her a hole to fall through and a garden to cushion her landing, and there lay no serpent but the litheness of this body.

In the kitchen, Bones pours them each a cool glass of water, reminding Janice, “Focus on stretching your hamstrings. You’re begging to pull something, running like that,” before tossing her a Granny Smith.

Janice bites, and it tastes brighter than heaven, sharp as scissors, sweet as the way Bones looks at her when she thinks Janice won’t notice—just because she’s got two eyes doesn’t mean her peripheral vision isn’t stellar—and also when she knows she will notice, how she looked at her on the bathroom floor, a look full of wonder and a willingness to be wounded.

Janice bites and chews and swallows.

Janice has a throat.

Janice is a person in person skin, and she’s ready to learn, and ready to touch the whole Earth.  

 


End file.
